Elsewhere in the industry, Quake and hardware acceleration were about to rocket action gaming into the polygonal stratosphere.Īs the SimCity 2000 revenue stream began to trail off, Will Wright cast about for something new, something different, something 3D. SimCity 2000 was gauche compared to 1995’s strategic heavy-hitters, Warcraft II and Command & Conquer. But the market was changing, and SimCity ‘s future hold on the rank and file looked tenuous.
Sim copter software#
Through 1994, with the release of SimCity 2000, the Maxis monopoly on software toys continued. SimEarth, SimAnt, SimLife, and SimFarm marked the years following 1989’s gold boom, to varying degrees of success. It was a golden era for Will Wright and his comrades at Maxis Software, and SimCity‘s phenomenal performance gave the studio breathing room to tinker with the software toy. Players could come and go as they pleased, but in general they came (and stayed) in unprecedented numbers: a million units sold by 1992. Instead the players called the shots, even to the extreme of wrecking their cities with a giant lizard or a tornado. No longer did the game designer, far removed by space and time, direct the experience with a firm hand. The subsystems conceal an essentially simple simulation beneath layers of perceived complexity and allow players to improvise their own fun. The appeal lay in its subsystem-driven design, in which traffic, population, disasters, and utilities begin to interplay in surprising ways. It was your sandbox – an empty canvas, a blank check. SimCity declined to dictate an end-game scenario.
What did the disembodied view represent? (A mayor’s daydreams over a topo map? A satellite feed? The eye of God?) And what did it mean to ‘win’ the game? SimCity‘s creator, Will Wright, coined the term “software toy” to emphasize his innovation, and for years SimCity remained the most popular software toy on the market as players wrangled with the game’s open-ended questions. Its tilt-shift world could exist only in computer space, powered by a million computing cycles per second. SimCity was video gaming’s first indigenous species. Digital paint software and virtual engineering kits such as Electronic Arts’ Construction Set series had existed for some time, but these were borrowed capital – video game adaptations of art class and Erector sets. Bullfrog’s Populouswas several months away, and Myst wouldn’t turn exploration into an industry staple for another four years. Back in February 1989, a game with neither an objective nor protagonist was still a novelty.
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